You're Not Sabotaging Your Sleep
Someone keeps telling her she's doing it wrong. They're wrong.
There is a specific kind of article that gets written about sleep.
You've read it. The headline promises five things, or seven, or ten. The things are: your phone, your wine, your coffee, your late dinner, your pet at the foot of the bed. Each one is something you're doing wrong. Each one comes with a fix. The fix is simple. The implication is that if you just did these things differently — if you just had a little more discipline, a little more willpower, a little more self-control — you would sleep.
What the article doesn't say is why you're on your phone at midnight in the first place. Why you can't wind down at night even when you're exhausted. Why the wine feels necessary. Why the coffee is non-negotiable. Why the thought of moving the dog off the bed is genuinely the last thing you have the energy to fight tonight.
It doesn't ask what your day looked like before you got to that moment.
It just tells you you're doing it wrong.
Here is what the research actually shows about why you can't sleep even when you're exhausted.
By the time she reaches 10pm, the average woman has made somewhere between 30,000 and 35,000 decisions. Small ones and large ones. What to pack, what to say, what to let go. What to notice that no one asked her to notice. What to remember that no one asked her to remember. Her brain has been in a state of continuous, low-grade executive function since she opened her eyes — a kind of cognitive labor that doesn't appear on any calendar and doesn't clock out with her.
Decision fatigue is not a metaphor. It is a neurological reality. Research shows that decision-making is one of the first cognitive functions to degrade under conditions of sustained depletion — and that women and men experience this differently, with women showing particular vulnerability in the domains of emotional regulation and executive function. The brain, by 10pm, is not choosing the scroll or the wine because it lacks willpower. It is choosing the path of least resistance because it has spent every available resource on the hundred other choices that came before.
The phone in bed is not a character flaw. It is a depleted brain seeking the easiest possible input. The wine is not weakness. It is the fastest available off-switch for a nervous system that has been running at capacity since 6am. The late eating, the inability to wind down, the lying awake running tomorrow's list — these are not failures of discipline. They are the predictable behaviors of a system that was never given the conditions to succeed.
She is not sabotaging her sleep.
The day is.
There is one point in the standard sleep advice article that lands differently from the others.
It's usually near the end. Almost an afterthought. The advice to stop telling yourself you're just a bad sleeper.
This one is true — but not for the reason the article means.
The sleep researchers who study chronic insomnia will tell you that one of the most powerful drivers of ongoing sleeplessness is not the phone, not the coffee, not the wine. It is the story she tells herself about who she is in relation to sleep. The identity she has built around her own brokenness. I've never been a good sleeper. I can't fall asleep. I wake up at 3am and that's just how I am. These stories become self-fulfilling. The expectation of wakefulness creates the wakefulness. The bed becomes associated with failure rather than rest.
This is real. This matters.
But why she adopted that story is never addressed. Nobody asks when she started believing it. Nobody asks what was happening in her life at the time — what she was carrying, managing, pretending was fine. Nobody asks whether the insomnia came before the story or the story before the insomnia, or whether both arrived together in the same season when something quietly became too much to hold.
She didn't decide to be a bad sleeper.
She decided to survive. And somewhere along the way, surviving came to look like staying up too late, and that late hour became the only one that was hers, and it became sacred and then guilty and then worse — and now here she is, lying awake at 1am, wondering what is wrong with her.
Nothing is wrong with her.
Women are approximately 40% more likely than men to experience insomnia.
Among women aged 35 to 44, the rates are higher still. Sleep disruptions are among the most common — and least discussed — symptoms of the hormonal shifts that begin years before menopause. Depression and anxiety, both of which occur at twice the rate in women, are two of the primary drivers of chronic poor sleep. The specific conditions of her life — the cognitive load she carries, the hours she keeps, the way her body is changing in ways nobody prepared her for — are structurally working against her rest.
This is not an excuse. It is a fact.
And a fact is more useful than a list.
Because if the problem is five things she's doing wrong at night, the solution is willpower. And she is out of willpower. She spent it before she got home.
But if the problem is a set of conditions — physiological, neurological, structural — then the solution is something different. It is not discipline. It is not a checklist of evening habits. It is not removing the dog from the bed.
It is permission.
Permission to understand that her body is not broken. That her sleep is not broken. That the conditions were never designed for her to succeed — and that she has been surviving them, quietly and completely, without a single article calling her extraordinary for it.
She is not sabotaging her sleep.
She is doing the best possible thing she can with what she has left.